Encountering Modernity

Introduction

Modernity and the Materiality of Religion

Albert L. Park and David K. Yoo

The story of Christianity in East Asia has been told in detail and with verve, chronicling the introduction and practice of Catholicism and Protestantism in China, Japan, and Korea. The existing literature is especially rich in documenting church and missionary activities. It also relates how varied regions and cultures have translated Christian ideas, practices, and symbols. Less evident, however, are studies that contextualize Christianity within the larger economic, political, social, and cultural developments in each of the three countries and its diasporas. The contributors to Encountering Modernity: Christianity in East Asia and Asian America address such concerns and, collectively, provide insights into the role that Christianity has played in the development of the region of East Asia and among East Asians in the United States.

Scholarship in English on East Asian Christianity grew significantly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Western missionary activities increased in the area. Not surprisingly, missionaries themselves wrote the majority of these studies on Christianity through publishing houses located in various denominations and missionary-built institutions. In the first half of the twentieth century in Korea, for example, presses such as the Christian Literature Society, the Korean Religious Book and Religious Tract Society, and the Chosen Mission Presbyterian Church U.S.A. distributed journals and books such as Korea Mission Field (1905–1941), History of the Korea Mission Presbyterian Church U.S.A. (1934), and The Nevius Plan for Mission Work (1937). During the 1930s and early 1940s, the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America published numerous materials on Christianity in China written by missionaries and Christian workers, such as China Missions (1937) and On the Shantung Front (1940). After 1945, books and articles on Christianity in China, Japan, and Korea were not only authored by missionaries, but also by native converts who served as pastors, educators, and lay workers in the church. For example, Arimichi Ebisawa, who was a professor of history at International Christian University in Japan, became a leading historian on Christianity in Japan through books such as Christianity in Japan (1960) and Christianity in Japan: A Bibliography of Japanese and Chinese Source (1960).1

These studies by Western missionaries and native converts to Christianity mainly centered on missiological issues and history as well as on the reception of Christian theology by natives and their church activities. Nicholas Standaert points out that the introduction of missiology as a theological discipline in the 1920s and 1930s pushed scholars to ask “whether the Chinese experience was representative of a certain missiological approach.”2 This research agenda was also applied to the examination of missionary movements in Korea and Japan. Many of these studies reviewed missionary activities in foreign settings in order to refine and further develop missionary strategies and methods. Hence, according to Standaert, in the field of Chinese Christian history, writers focused on the work and ministries of missionaries such as Matteo Ricci, Adam Schall von Bell, and Ferdinand Verbiest.3 Expanding the field of missiology further required studies on how Japanese, Korean, and Chinese converts to Christianity responded to missionary teachings and how they practiced Christianity in their local settings. Examining church activities and movements further helped refine and strengthen the mutual efforts of missionaries and East Asian Christians, contributing to an increased church membership in the three countries.

By focusing so much on the ideas and practices of missionaries and the way Christian theology was interpreted and practiced by natives, studies of Christianity in China, Korea, and Japan have failed to look at this religion within a larger historical context. Put differently, these studies have provided little insight into how Christianity as a system of ideas, practices, and institutions affected and shaped political, social, economic, and cultural structures in East Asia, and what role it played in mediating people’s everyday lives as they also experienced modernity and capitalism. Some studies on Christianity in Korea, such as the edited volume Christianity in Korea have analyzed the role the Protestant Church played in terms of Korean nationalism under Japanese colonial rule. A central focus has been how Japanese imperialism affected church activities, as in the 1937–1938 Shinto shrine controversy. Only recently, with the use of postcolonial, critical, and cultural theories and through research conducted by those outside of the church and its institutions have studies illuminated the role Christianity played in political, social, and economic developments in China, Japan, and Korea. Hyaeweol Choi’s book Gender and Mission Encounter in Korea and Kelly H. Chong’s book Deliverance and Submission are two examples of studies that have analyzed the relationship between Christianity and social structures such as gender roles. Furthermore, Ryan Dunch’s book Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of Modern China, 1859–1927, has helped expand Chinese historiography through its examination of Christian ideas and how they informed political thought and movements in modern China.5 Yet, these books represent the exception, as the scholarship on East Asian Christianity continues to focus on missionary activities and native church practices and developments.

The existing historiography, moreover, has tended to focus on a single East Asian country rather than providing a sense of how Christianity unfolded in the region. History of Christianity in Asia in two volumes by Samuel H. Moffett stands in contrast to the trend and is significant in documenting and analyzing the role of Christianity in the broad expanse of the Asian continent. Moffett provides a rich and deep history, rooted in the tradition of church history and missiology. The comparative frame employed by Moffett is less about individuals and communities and more about institutional traditions.6

Encountering Modernity contributes to the scholarship by bringing together studies of Christianity in China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan and their diasporas that expand the field through new perspectives that look at how Christian ideas, practices, and institutions were adopted, translated, and practiced in relation to political, economic, social, and cultural developments in order to negotiate phenomena such as modernity. This mode of analysis not only results in a deeper understanding of Christianity, but also produces more informed and nuanced histories of East Asian countries that take seriously the structures and sensibilities of religion, broadly understood and within a national and transnational context. This volume critically investigates how Protestant Christianity was negotiated and interpreted by individuals in Korea, China (with a brief look at Taiwan), and Japan starting in the nineteenth century as all three countries became incorporated into the global economy and the international nation-state system anchored by the West. People in East Asia from various walks of life studied and, in some cases, embraced principles of Christianity as a way to frame and make meaningful the changes they experienced because of modernity.

For clarity, it is important to explain the term “modernity.” According to Raymond Williams, “modern” appeared at first “as a term more or less synonymous with ‘now’ in the late sixteenth century, and in any case used to mark the period off from medieval and ancient times.”7 More specifically, “modern” was a chronological term that denoted a new historical period starting in the middle of the fifteenth century in Europe. Several institutional features distinguished the modern period from the earlier period in history. Relying on theories and historical works by Anthony Giddens, Max Weber, Charles Tilly, and Jürgen Habermas, Kim Dong-no argues that these new institutions reshaped the political system, economic system, culture, and social relationships.8 The first new political feature of the modern period was the nation-state, which “can be defined by its centralized power structure, clearly demarcated boundaries, institutional separation between politics and other realms of everyday life (especially economy), and the monopoly of legitimate means of physical violence.”9 Second, capitalism, especially industrial capitalism, became the dominant economic system, where “mass production and mass consumption prevail for the maximization of profit as opposed to the precapitalist one dominated by the principle of subsistence.” Third, in the area of social relationships, the modern period featured the “detachment of the individual from traditional collectives” in order to shift personal loyalty to the nation-state and allow the individual to commodify his or her own labor without inference from any “supraindividual entity.” Finally, nationalism emerged as a new cultural force in the modern period, as it “enabled the horizontal integration of individuals by cross-cutting various political, economic, and social interests, thereby replacing the vertical hierarchy of traditional society.”10 The first new political feature and social interests, thereby replacing the vertical hierarchy of traditional society.”10 Urbanization and rationalization also represented prominent features of the modern period.11 Far from denying that these features may have appeared earlier in history, scholars emphasize that these elements collectively became dominant features in society that organized people’s daily lives in new and powerful ways, thus setting the modern period apart from previous historical periods.

“Modern” lost its meaning as a chronological term that simply denoted a new historical period as it became intertwined with various ideological-based processes that turned it into a normative category. Totalities of history, especially those articulated by Karl Marx and G. W. F. Hegel, configured the modern as an essential stage of history that needed to be reached in order to achieve progress and the unfolding of model personhood and society. These totalities envisioned a linear history with a beginning, middle, and end through which the goals of the respective histories were played out, and, more important, they located the origins of these historical totalities in the West. For both Hegel and Marx, these histories were universal totalities in that their goals applied not only to Westerners, but also to people and societies throughout the world. What was right for Westerners in their present and future was appropriate and right for non-Westerners because these historical totalities were presumed to be based on universal beliefs and categories. These totalities of history ultimately became the authoritative philosophies or ideologies on modernity that promised a positive progression of society.12

Framed as “truth” and what “ought” to be and backed by political and military power, theories on modernity were exported to many parts of the non-West through Western colonialism and imperialism. In particular, they forced people in East Asia to organize knowledge in a particular way and to adopt a particular ideological orientation for political, economic, and social development. In terms of the production of knowledge, there are a number of examples of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese scholars in the late nineteenth century using Hegel’s theory to dig into the past and identify which institutions and elements to eliminate or cultivate for the purpose of becoming modern. Sinologists and historians in Meiji Japan, for example, constructed new categories for historical investigation, such as Tōyō (Orient) and Shina (China), based on the epistemological framework on modern historical development found in the West. They used these categories to investigate the origins of the nation and Japan’s historical development in East Asia in order to validate its ability to become modern and ultimately lead other Asian countries to achieve modernity.13 As for ideology, a diverse group of people in East Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including government officials, intellectuals, and social reformers, were guided by the belief that the modern period was the highest stage of humanity and a universal phenomenon that began in the West. Therefore, in order to start the linear development toward modernity in which one stage of development led to another and ultimately ended with “catching up with the West,” proponents of modernization recognized it as necessary to adopt the “civilized and enlightened” ideas, practices, and institutions popular in the West.14 In other words, government leaders, intellectuals, and social reformers in Korea, China, and Japan pursued a process of “modernization” that included reforms such as constructing a strong central state, developing industrial capitalism, fostering nationalism, and promoting urbanization.

As a category to organize knowledge and guide practice, modernity, or more specifically multiple theories on modernity, influenced notions of the ideal form of human subjectivity and society. More than just capturing imaginations and remaining in the world of ideas, these theories pushed

intellectuals, politicians, and ordinary citizens to materially organize the world in order to reach the goal of becoming modern—a process that reshaped the political, economic, and social landscapes of East Asia. Before and after 1945, the quest to realize modernity through modernization produced effects in East Asian societies and countries that were far from the promising results guaranteed by these theories: imperialism, colonialism, war, political authoritarianism, social division, ecological ruin, and wide-ranging economic inequality. In effect, modernization has set into motion far-reaching and unanticipated changes that have extended well into the present.

Since the late nineteenth century, Protestant Christianity has been an important source and system of ideas and knowledge for intellectuals, politicians, and everyday people in Korea, China, Taiwan, and Japan to help them negotiate modernity and give them meaning and direction in a changing present, especially as imperialism and colonialism have threatened their countries’ sovereignty. Protestant Christianity in East Asia, in particular, was often mediated and understood through the history and the particular cultural and social structures of a local area or a given people. Through this interaction, Protestant Christianity inspired new forms of subjectivity, visions of society, and conceptions of national identity. Moreover, new forms of Protestant Christianity emerged and took on characteristics of “new religions.” Today, Protestant Christianity has thrived in China and especially in Korea, which today is the second largest exporter of missionaries in the world.

Although the missionary legacies in East Asia have been an important part of the story, the chapters presented in this volume explore the ways in which Christianity was given shape and form by those who received it. As one of our contributors documented in an earlier study, indigenous forms took root often in direct resistance to missionary efforts that failed to reach deeply into the souls of the people. While understanding indigenous forms of Christianity is important, the contribution of Encountering Modernity lies less in parsing out what is native versus foreign and more in the analysis and interpretation of contact and exchange, negotiation, and adaptation. It is in those intersections, tensions, and transitions that we discover a role for this religious tradition as part of its larger context and its societal influence that is greater than numbers of adherents might suggest.15

In addition, many of the authors of this volume are attentive to transnational processes, such as how Koreans, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese people “exported” Christianity back to other parts of the world, including the United States, through an investigation of Asian American Chris-

tian experience. Increasingly, the line between Asian and Asian American Studies has been blurred, reflecting the movements of people, goods, and ideas that have been taking place for some time between East Asia and the United States. The fields have distinctive legacies, but there is a convergence taking place that is opening up greater opportunities for conversation and dialogue. In that sense, this volume brings together what have often been treated as separate spheres. Ultimately, these chapters introduce new methodologies for the study of the relationship between Christianity and modernity in East Asia and its diasporas that draw up theoretical tools found in the areas of history, sociology, religious studies, and cultural studies.

The transnational approach also complicates long-standing categories and dividing lines such as “East” and “West.” Christianity was very much a part of and in some cases directly facilitated the movement and multi-directional flow of labor and capital. How do we make sense of terms like “east” and “west” when a variety of Christianity born out of contact and exchange in East Asia is rerouted to the country that sent the missionaries to East Asia and then is planted in locales marked by different racial, social, and cultural dynamics? In addition, what does it mean that Korea sends so many missionaries throughout the world, including to regions thought to be the core of “Western” Christianity?

In effect, Encountering Modernity demonstrates that it makes less and less sense to think of Christianity as a “Western” religion rather than as a world religion. Lamin Sanneh, among others, has pointed to a resurgence of Christianity in the post–World War II period in which Christianity has become the principal religion of the peoples of the world with over 2 billion adherents. This resurgence has been marked by the twilight of the Western phase of Christianity. The dynamic growth of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America has signaled the early stages of a Christianity centered on regions once considered the edges of the religious tradition, including East Asia and Asian America.16

While the theme of religion and modernity underlies and connects the chapter of this book, four more specific themes tie certain chapters together: (1) the links between economy and religion, (2) religion as a medium for social relationships, (3) the sacred and social activism, and (4) national identity and religion. Links between economy and religion are a well-studied theme in various disciplines. Rejecting the notion that economy and religion represent autonomous spheres, scholars such as Max Weber and Karl Polanyi have shown how religious beliefs legitimize and motivate economic practices, and the organization of the economy has often affected religion. Contemporary discourse on the relationship between religion and economy has been significantly shaped by anthropologists, such as Jean and John Comaroff, who have demonstrated that resurgence of religion depends on socioeconomic conditions and that sacred signs and symbols in occult economies have often served as popular means to negotiate and control the forces of capitalism. Contributing to this discourse on the connection between capitalism and religion through multiple historical sources, Albert L. Park examines the process in which capitalism unfolded in Korea through ideas and institutions developed by the Protestant Christian Church after 1885. Specifically, through a study of the Nevius Plan and the Industrial Education Departments, Park argues that the Protestant Christian Church supplied language and practices that exposed Koreans to the principles of capitalism. The Nevius Plan, which promoted a financially self-supporting native church, introduced Korean followers to a new language of money, work, and economy, while Industrial Education Departments became places where young Koreans actually experienced the principles of capitalism by learning business skills and how to manufacture various goods. Park contributes to the scholarship on the history of capitalism in Korea by analyzing the historical links between religion and economics. Eun Young L. Easley’s chapter continues the dialogue on the relationship between religion and economy by documenting the growth of megachurches in Korea since the 1990s, especially the impact of neoliberalism on Korean Christians. Within this context, Easley pays attention to what she terms starter megachurches, large congregations that have come into being recently, which represent the latest era of postwar Korean Christianity. The argument forwarded is that these churches reflect a postindustrial society in which leading pastors have embraced an individual orientation geared toward personal responsibility for material success that supports the free flow of capital, less governmental intervention, and the acceptance of social inequality. These starter megachurches have also employed market adaptations such as online stores and themed social services, providing comfort and meaning in times of rapid global change.

Alongside religion and economy, two chapters by a historian and a sociologist examine the theme of religion as a medium for social relationships. Religion’s role in cultivating and sustaining social relationships and communities has been a popular subject of study toward understanding how individuals foster means of exchange and contact in the face of capitalist forces that have been known to create social inequality and conflicts. These two chapters skillfully document and analyze the relationship between religion and community formation in relation to changing material conditions within Chinese, Taiwanese, and Taiwanese American Christian communities. Joseph Tse-Hei Lee’s chapter draws on Western archival materials, local congregational histories, and fieldwork data to analyze the integration of Christianity into rural China during the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in Guangdong Province in southern China. Lee traces how Christianity spread through lineage networks that adapted and indigenized teachings and rituals to their unique cultural contexts. In the process, these Chinese Christians formed a regional hub of religious activity outside the English Presbyterian Mission headquarters in the treaty port of Shantou. The process of contact and exchange spawned new and reinforced old identities among the village converts, underscoring the linkages between Christianity and Chinese grassroots society. Carolyn Chen connects the development of Christianity among contemporary Taiwanese Americans to both the large-scale twentieth-century political, economic, and social transformations in East Asia, and the individual and communal everyday realities of Taiwanese Americans. Transformations in Taiwan and around the globe created the conditions for the mass migration of an educated Taiwanese population to the United States. Although the majority of Taiwanese Americans came to the United States as nominal Buddhists, many were attracted to Christianity because ethnic churches responded to their practical needs as a displaced population. Taiwanese Americans used their newfound Christianity to reconstruct their communities, families, and selves in the United States. These two chapters give us a nuanced picture of religion as an institution for social relations while providing details that further explain why people value religion in modern society.

The theme of the sacred and social activism connects three chapters, as each one explores the ways in which followers of Protestant Christianity pursued political, economic, and social reforms and the establishment of a heaven on earth as means for advancing the principles and objectives of their religion. Each of the chapters shows how local and global conditions shaped Christian theologies into forces that inspired and undergirded social movements to secure people’s bodies, minds, and souls. Kyusik Chang engages the issue of modernity in Korea during the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945) with the city of P’yŏngyang serving as a case study. Chang is less interested in church growth and missions, and focuses instead on how Koreans embraced Christianity as a model of modern Western civilization. Christianity helped to create a public sphere through organizations like the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in which debates took place on a wide range of topics. Leaders like Cho Man-sik envisioned a Christian basis of commerce as a basis for the building of the kingdom of God and an independent Korea against the backdrop of Japanese colonialism. Yunjae Park’s chapter also looks at Christianity during the colonial period, tracing the history of the Severance Hospital in Korea as it transformed from a government hospital to a Christian institution. Those associated with the hospital from 1885 to 1945 had to navigate operations under the Korean government and then Japanese colonialism while also addressing differing missionary expectations of how the hospital was to function as an arm of evangelistic efforts in Korea. Medical missionaries as well as mission personnel wrestled with how to frame health care and the practice of medicine as a Christian vocation of compassion in a secular setting and a larger society in which Christianity operated as a distinct minority. Finally, a transnational-based Christian social activism is explored in the chapter by Mark Mullins that follows the expansive career of the progressive Japanese Christian leader Kagawa Toyohiko. Mullins situates Kagawa within a global Christianity in which the trajectory of Japanese Christianity was not limited to or dictated by a missionary agenda. A well-educated and cosmopolitan figure, Kagawa through his writings and activities spawned an international Christian social movement during the 1920s through the 1950s. The United States played a key role for Kagawa, through his experiences as a student but also as a source of support for his ideas and institution building that included Japanese American Christians. Together these three chapters help us understand the factors and reasons behind the rise of faith-based social movements that deemphasize conversion, while Park’s chapter specifically gives further insight into why conservative Christian leaders and followers have criticized any movement other than those that directly evangelize and seek to convert people.

Finally, the theme of national identity and religion is explored and investigated in four chapters that cover Japanese, Chinese, and Korean American communities. Studies on the intersection between nationalism and religion reveal that religious ideas and practices have commonly legitimized and reaffirmed nationalist principles and have been used to foster a national body. Studies also show that religion has served as a counterforce to national ideologies by offering principles that question standard political discourse and by cultivating loyalties beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. The two chapters on Christianity in Japan before 1945 shed further light on this complicated area between religion and nationalism. In Garrett Washington’s chapter, the focus is on nation-making in Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how Protestant churches provided one of the many spaces in which Japanese peoples added their own interpretations to those being constructed by the government. In particular, pastors came to embody visions of the nation for Japan’s well-educated, well-traveled, and sociopolitically concerned new middle class. Washington moves the discussion of pre–World War II Japan away from a simplistic link between Christianity and a jingoistic nationalism to a more diversified and complex understanding of the relationship between religion and the state. Sermons of pastors preaching during these times provide insights into the process of modernization taking place in Japan and the ways that they used the lens of Christianity to make sense of these issues. Gregory Vanderbilt’s chapter assesses the question of what might constitute “Japanese Christianity” that surfaced in the 1930s at a time of military aggression. Increased political controls and mobilization of the populace, recognizable as fascism, were swept up into ideology that promised the “overcoming of modernity” and the purification of the national body. The first generation of Protestant Christians, who were born into samurai families before Christianity’s relegalization in 1873, were passing from the scene, and the generation that was assuming leadership had been born into the ideology of the “emperor system.” Vanderbilt unpacks the viability of Christianity itself as it traveled to new situations through second-generation Japanese Christians who published a Christian magazine, the Voice at the Lakeside.

David K. Yoo’s chapter on diasporic Korean Christianity in the earlier decades of the twentieth century specifically explores the transnational relationship between nationalism and Christianity. Focusing on a publication called the Korean Student Bulletin, sponsored by the International YMCA, Yoo documents how Korean international and Korean American college and graduate students navigated their times while attending schools in the United States. Protestant Christianity served as a logic and grammar for students. Relational themes of religion and race, migration and exile, and colonialism and independence frame the discussion and analysis. The intersection between nationalism, religion, and politics is also explored in David Ownby’s piece, which chronicles the rise of Protestant Christianity in post-Mao China that has been part of a broader religious revival and that has accompanied China’s economic and social transformation. In particular, Ownby follows the “house church” movement, which is the least subject to government control and that stands in contrast to the government-sponsored Protestant Church. Moreover, the chapter focuses on the role of Chinese missionary groups in the diaspora such as the China Soul for Christ Foundation and their high-quality docudramas produced in the United States that “educate” Chinese Protestants on their own history and contemporary situation. Ownby suggests that these dramas may serve as a unifying force for Protestantism in China.

Through a multidisciplinary, comparative approach to exploring multiple themes, Encountering Modernity grounds and contextualizes religious ideas, practices, and institutions within material conditions and thus sheds light on the processes of interpreting and practically applying religion in relation to modernity. As the chapters below illuminate, Christian leaders and followers in East Asian and Asian American communities continuously conceptualized and reconceptualized traditional religious language, symbols, signs, and practices as ways to interpret and negotiate the forces of modernity and adapt to built environments that were rapidly changing. In effect, for them, religion became a source for developing their visions of the ideal and of means to give value to and control the changing present as they materialized their spiritual visions. These chapters further show that Christians pursued their religious activities and missions with the same objective as all modernist movements from the left to the right. That is, they sought to bridge the gap between material reality and the ideal in order to achieve meaningful experiences and a secure existence and therefore to domesticate modernity. Thus, the ideas, practices, and institutions of Christian leaders, followers, and groups studied in the book and those of modernist movements converged at times because both sides shared similar encounters and experiences of modernity. Yet, at other times, they diverged because individuals and groups used different language to interpret and negotiate modernity and experiences, beliefs, and practices formed according to different local contexts and built environments.

The narratives that compose Encountering Modernity represent a broad-based inquiry into the questions and issues posed here, examining the complexities of Christianity as it played out in East Asia and in its diasporic expressions in the United States. The authors provide fascinating glimpses into a lived religion that took many forms through time and place. Moreover, they supply diverse interpretative lenses through which to explore the varied nature of Christianity and religion in East Asian and Asian American communities. In particular, the chapters by Eun Young L. Easely, Kyusik Chang, and Yunjae Park offer excellent representations of Korean historiography on Christianity that pay close attention to details in their investigation and analysis of specific historical issues, events, and developments. These three chapters introduce readers, who may only be familiar with works by US-trained scholars, to another form of scholarship and methodology to help interpret Christian ideas and institutions in East Asia. None of the contributors, including the scholars from South Korea, would claim a comprehensive methodology or perspective, but what does emerge from this book is a fuller and a more contextualized picture of how a particular religion set into motion an encounter with modernity that had long-lasting and significant consequences for all involved. In the end, the chapters in this book provide valuable contributions to a sustained conversation regarding religion and modernity—grounded in a particular region but with broader implications that stretch well beyond East Asia.

1. Arimichi Ebisawa, Christianity in Japan, part 1: 1543–1858 (Tokyo: Com-

mittee on Asian Cultural Studies, International Christian University, 1960); and

Arimichi Ebisawa, Christianity in Japan: A Bibliography of Japanese and Chinese

Sources (Tokyo: Committee on Asian Cultural Studies, International Christian

2. Nicholas Standaert, “New Trends in the Historiography of Christianity in

China,” The Catholic Historical Review 83, no. 4 (October 1997): 574.

4. Robert E. Buswell and Timothy S. Lee, eds., Christianity in Korea (Hono-

lulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007).

5. Hyaeweol Choi, Gender and Mission Encounters: New Women and Old

Ways (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Kelly H. Chong, Deliver-

ance and Submission (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008);

and Ryan Dunch, Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of Modern China, 1857–1927

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

6. Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, vol. 1: Beginnings

to 1500 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998), and A History of Christianity in Asia,

vol. 2: 1500–1900 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998).

7. Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism (London: Verso Press, 2007), 31.

8. Dong-no Kim, “National Identity and Class Interest in Peasant Movements

during the Colonial Period” (unpublished paper, Yonsei University, 2004), 5.

11. Dilip Parameshwa Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” in Alternative modernity and the materiality of religion 15

Modernity, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 1–9; Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), pts. 3 and 4.

12. See Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History From the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

13. Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient (Berkeley: University of California Press,

14. Andre Schmid, Korea between Empires (New York: Columbia University

15. Mark Mullins, Christianity Made in Japan: A Study of Indigenous Movements (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998).

16. Lamin Sanneh, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).